The Emergence of Enshittification

The Emergence of Enshittification

The word ‘Enshittification’, originally coined by Cory Doctorow.

During the 2010s, a Swedish gamer known as PewDiePie filmed himself reacting loudly to video games in his bedroom. It was simple, it was personal, and it worked. Around the same time, a group of friends calling themselves Dude Perfect turned endless trick shots into a global format. MrBeast once filmed himself counting out loud all the way to 100,000, and millions tuned in to watch. Perhaps these creators grew up watching the early Jackass series on MTV, the original template for filming yourself doing something reckless just to get a reaction. None of it was harmful. Most of it was fun. At first.

The problem was never any single creator. It was the machine they were feeding. Every video had to beat the last one to survive the algorithm, so the stakes kept climbing. By the time the biggest channels were giving away free money to last-to-leave contestants of some game show, the bar for holding a teenager’s attention had moved to senseless and useless spectacle. It became the baseline. Rage bait & angry social media posts get viral. Peaceful, informative or useful content simply didn’t get pushed as often.

I do not use social media myself, largely because there is too much enshittification on it, too much noise to sift through before you reach anything worth the time. That is a choice I get to make as an adult who has learned what is worth my attention. A 13 yr old, handed the same feed, has not had the years it takes to tell the difference between what is worth watching and what is simply engineered to take their time.

None of this makes your teenager broken, and it does not make these creators villains. The content they grew up with was built to escalate, and a generation slowly learned to treat the loudest, fastest, most extreme version of everything as normal. The real cost is not on the screen. The slow rot shows up later, affecting their focus and attention span.

When Watching Turns Into Copying

Children learn by copying. They always have. What has changed is the example set in front of them. When the most-rewarded thing on a feed is a loud stunt or a pointless dare, that becomes the template. Teenagers absorb the meaningless act, film their own version, and chase the same reaction. And they think it’s “cool”. The behaviour they pick up is the behaviour the algorithm paid for.

Some of it is harmless silliness. Some of it shapes them more than that. A lot of it slides into woke-ism, a teenager spending months absorbing whatever the internet has collectively decided to be outraged about that week, repeating opinions they have not thought through and performing a stance for an audience rather than holding a view they actually understand. The pattern underneath is always the same. React, perform, move on. Nothing productive comes out of it, no skill picked up, no project built.

I have 2 boys, both growing teenagers. One time, one of them did some silly meme he picked up on YouTube, and I said: “What’s that for? Now, I want you to think for a minute. That roast chicken you just ate, think about the effort that took. It started as a chick, a farmer had to raise it on a farm, then it grew up, was slaughtered, shipped to the supermarket, brought home, and cooked. All of that effort, just so you had the calories. And what did you spend that energy on?”

Do Useful Things

This is the philosophy I keep coming back to, in the grand scheme of things, is to “do useful things.” I believe we are put on this Earth to be useful, to build, to fix, to provide, to improve something a little better than we found it. That is the whole purpose. When I was a kid, in the cartoon, ‘Smurfs’, my favourite character was the “Handy Smurf” . (wiki Smurf characters)

Useful is rarely glamorous and it never trends. Learn a real skill, finish what you start, be someone people can count on. None of it comes with a ‘likes’ counter to show off. But the real stuff matters far more than video ‘views’ and profile ‘likes’ ever will.

At Mind Theory, whenever a student sets out to generate some AI slop or silly viral meme, I ask them, Is that useful? Or did you just waste your calories on that? I always encourage them…

Do useful things. Ignore the noise.

Established in March 2023, Mind Theory is Singapore’s pioneering AI education provider, offering Gen AI holiday camps for children, teens, and secondary school programs. To find out more, visit our Courses page.

Students build web apps through vibe coding. design animations and Roblox games using AI-powered tools. These aren’t just projects. they are a practice in creative problem-solving, technical fluency, and experimentation.

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